The data science field is currently oversaturated, to say the least.
However, the field isn’t oversaturated with qualified candidates, if that’s what you thought I meant. You may see hundreds of candidates applying for a single job posting, but very few of those candidates are actually qualified individuals who could analyze data if their lives depended on it.
A few years ago I was involved in screening resumes for a position my company at the time was hiring for. I posted the job on LinkedIn, along with a few criteria questions. In the first couple of days, we received about 20–30 applications, but after reviewing the applications, as well as sifting through the ones that LinkedIn filtered out due to their answers to the criteria questions, only two were viable candidates. Extrapolate this experience to those data science postings where 300 candidates have applied, and you can imagine how many of those are actual contenders.
In tech, it’s very easy to call yourself a designer, a software engineer, or a data scientist. In many instances, the meaning of these job titles has changed over time. For example, “data scientist” used to refer to a very senior person at a company who had a Master- or PhD-level education in the field. In contrast, now, anyone who completes a data science bootcamp may feel qualified to call themselves a data scientist because they understand statistics and can use some data analysis libraries.
All of this means that with all of the noise recruiters have to wade through to get to the legitimate candidates, you need to step up your resume game to stand out from the rest. None of the suggestions listed below are groundbreaking or revolutionary, and if anything, you’ve probably heard of them before. However, once you start paying attention to these details, recruiters will begin paying more attention to you. Here are five things you can do to your resume to make a recruiter look at your resume twice.